How can we foster and integrate feminist ideas into development
conversations that take place in large international organizations?
WAPPP fellow Elisabeth Prügl finds that feminist ideas have triumphed
and been tamed at the same time within the World Bank. Prügl analyzes a
variety of documents and interviews with gender experts to identify how
these contradictory effects have taken place. Speaker: Elisabeth M Prügl, WAPPP Fellow,
2014-2015; Professor of International Relations; Director, Program for
Gender and Global Change, Graduate Institute of International and
Development Studies, Geneva

How can we work toward greater gender equality and women’s empowerment in OECD countries and emerging economies around the world? The OECD’s answer is focusing on the 3 “E”s: education, employment and entrepreneurship. Recent public policy initiatives such as the OECD Gender Recommendation and gender work by the G20 forum emphasize the importance of increasing female labor force participation to achieve strong and balanced growth. OECD’s Head of Social Policy Division, Monika Queisser reviews these recommendations and other initiatives in the OECD countries, and disseminates new findings that aim to achieve better representation of women in public sector leadership. Speaker: Monika Queisser, Head of Social Policy Division, Directorate of Employment, Labour and Social Affairs, OECD

Men and women respond differently to risk. Women are more risk averse
than men, which has a significant impact on how they make decisions.
Exploring this topic, Alexandra van Geen runs a series of experiments to
evaluate under what conditions women and men are more or less willing
to take risks. Specifically, she examines whether women and men are more
likely to take risks when the financial reward is higher; if they are
sensitive to the presence of other risks in the decision environment; or
whether winning in the past makes them more likely to take risk in the
future. She finds stark gender differences, including that men greatly
increase risk taking after winning a lottery, while women do not.
Investigating how, when and why men and women respond differently in
risky environments can help close the gender gap in risk taking.

While there has been an impressive groundswell of attention to sexual
and gender-based violence in conflict research and in international
advocacy, there has been little systematic analysis of how
organizational power structures and local contexts inform the nature and
dynamics of such violence. WAPPP Fellow, Zoe Marks, examines the
intersecting dynamics of power and gender in armed groups in Africa by
using her extensive research conducted on the Revolutionary United Front
(RUF) in Sierra Leone. Her study analyzes how context and power affect
the dynamics of sexual and gender-based violence by looking at when and
how women obtain power in armed groups and what their power tells us
about the politics of violence. Speaker: Zoe Marks, WAPPP Fellow, 2014; Chancellor's Fellow, Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh

Men and women throughout the world want to provide for their families
and ensure their children have a good start in life. Often, the chance
to start a business or get a job is the surest way to accomplish this
goal. But how can we be sure that women have the same opportunities as
men to fulfill their economic potential? The World Bank Group's Women,
Business and the Law project presents a unique dataset examining how the
law can help or impede women from working and earning an income and
what can be done to improve women's economic rights.